David G Blanchflower
Biographic Data
| ID | 266940 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David G Blanchflower |
| GIVEN NAMES | David G |
| FAMILY NAME | Blanchflower |
| SIGNATURE | BLANCHFLOWER D G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2856-7039 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 387 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Deteriorating Mental Well‐Being of the Young in the UK
Using several data sets for the UK we track rising perceptions of mental well‐being among the working‐age population in the UK. The trend is apparent among all age groups and for men and women, but it is most pronounced among the young, and especially young women aged under 25. Young men's mental well‐being began to fall markedly from 2008 whereas young women's mental ill‐health began to deteriorate a few years later. The age profile of mental we…
Rising young worker despair in the United States
Between the early 1990s and 2015 the relationship between mental despair and age was hump-shaped in the United States: it rose in middle-age, then declined later in life. That relationship has now changed: mental despair declines with age due to a rise in despair among the young. However, we show for the first time that the relationship between age and mental despair differs by labor market status. The hump-shape in age still exists among non-wor…
The Mental Health of the Young in Latin America
We examine the mental wellbeing of the young in 18 Latin American countries using data from five cross-country comparative studies and both cross-sectional and quarterly time series data for a single country, Mexico. We examine whether there has been a decline in youth mental health and, if so, whether it has removed the U-shape in happiness and the hump-shape in unhappiness in Latin America as it has done in the United States and elsewhere. The …
Seasonality and the female happiness paradox
Most studies tracking wellbeing do not collect data across all the months in a year. This leads to error in estimating gender differences in wellbeing for three reasons. First, there are seasonal patterns in wellbeing (particularly life satisfaction and happiness) which are gendered, so failure to account for those confounds estimates of gender differences over time. Second, studies fielded in discrete parts of the year cannot extrapolate to gend…
The female happiness paradox
Using data across countries and over time, we show that women have worse mental health than men in negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used — anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger — and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives, such as democracy, the economy, the state of education, and health services. They are also…
The wage curve after the Great Recession
Most economists maintain that the labour market in the USA (and elsewhere) is ‘tight’ because unemployment rates are low, and the Beveridge curve (the vacancies‐to‐unemployment ratio) is high. They infer from this that there is potential for wage‐push inflation. However, real wages fell rapidly in 2022, and prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some time. We show that unemployment is not key to understanding wage formation in the USA, a…
The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood
Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child's mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course. We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in …
The Gender Well-Being Gap
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 SWB metrics-37 positive affect and 18 negative affect-contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect…
Wellbeing Rankings
Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive wellbeing measures-life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested-and four negative wellbeing variables-pain, sadness, anger and worry. Pooling the data for 2008-2017 we find country and sta…
Is pain associated with subsequent job loss? A panel study for Germany
The cross‐sectional association between pain and unemployment is well‐established. But the absence of panel data containing information on pain and labor market status has meant that less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions suggest results are sensitive to the measurement of pain and model specification. We contribute to this l…
Union membership and job satisfaction over the life course
We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life‐course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). We find there is a significant negative correlation between union membership and job satisfaction that is apparent across the life‐course. Lagged union membership status going back many years is…
Taking the pulse of nations: A biometric measure of well-being
The Mid-Life Dip in Well-Being: A Critique
The U Shape of Happiness: A Response
We write in response to an article published in this journal, “The U Shape of Happiness Across the Life Course: Expanding the Discussion,” by Galambos, Krahn, Johnson and Lachman. The authors claim that “support for the purported U shape is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed” and “we believe the conclusion that happiness declines from late adolescence to midlife (the first half of the U shape) is premature, and possibly wrong.” W…
Does Pain Lead to Job Loss? A Panel Study for Germany
The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established.But the absence of panel data containing data on pain and labor market status has meant less is known about the direction of any causal linkage.Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions suggest results are sensitive to the measurement of pain and model specification.We contribute to this literature using…
Unemployment and sleep: Evidence from the United States and Europe
Native Americans’ Experience of Chronic Distress in the USA
The U‐shape of happiness in Scotland
We examine well‐being in Scotland using micro data from the Scottish Health Survey and the UK Annual Population Surveys. We find evidence of a midlife nadir or zenith in Scotland in well‐being at around age 50 using a variety of measures of both happiness and unhappiness. We confirm that higher consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with higher levels of happiness in Scotland. We compare this with evidence for England from the Health S…
Underemployment in the United States and Europe
The authors produce estimates for a new and better rate of underemployment for 25 countries using the European Labor Force Survey that is based on workers’ reports of their preferred hours at the going wage. Both voluntary and involuntary part-time workers report they want more hours. Full-time workers who say they want to change their hours, mostly say they want to reduce them. When the Great Recession hit, the number of hours of those who said …
Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries
Children, unhappiness and family finances
Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993–2019
Objectives. To investigate changes from 1993 to 2019 in the percentage of US citizens suffering extreme distress. Methods. Using data on 8.1 million randomly sampled US citizens, we created a new proxy measure for exceptional distress (the percentage who reported major mental and emotional problems in all 30 of the last 30 days). We examined time trends for different groups and predictors of distress. Results. The proportion of the US population …
Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
A candid explanation of how the labor market really works and is central to everything—and why it is not as healthy as we think Relying on unemployment numbers is a dangerous way to gauge how the labor market is doing. Because of a false sense of optimism prior to the COVID-19 shock, the working world was more vulnerable than it should have been. Not Working is about how people want full-time work at a decent wage and how the plight of the undere…
Children, Unhappiness and Family Finances: Evidence from One Million Europeans
The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest.We here consider over one million observations on Europeans from ten years of Eurobarometer surveys, and in the first instance replicate this negative finding, both in the overall data and then for most different marital statuses.Children are expensive, and controlling for financial difficulties tur…
Youth Joblessness
Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle
Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries
An Introduction to the Wage Curve
This paper documents a statistical regulatity or law. It shows that there exists a downward-sloping curve linking the level of a worker's pay to the unemployment rate in the worker's region. The same curve can be found in microeconomic data sets from sixteen countries. The existence of this curve raises doubts about conventional wisdom in labor economics, regional economics, and macroeconomics
Fear, Unemployment and Migration
We examine the impact on the UK economy of the flow of workers from ten East European countries after their accession to the European Union. We find evidence that those most susceptible to competition from these workers have seen weaker wage inflation. We document that the presence of these foreign workers has increased the fear of unemployment and helped to contain wage pressure. We argue that this inflow of workers has increased supply by more …
The Attitudinal Legacy of Communist Labor Relations
This study of workers' attitudes compares data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) surveys for former communist countries in Europe with ISSP data for Western countries over the period 1987-93, which covers the beginning of the transition to a market economy for the former communist countries. Consistent with their hypothesis that communist-run economies left an attitudinal "legacy," the authors find that the citizens of former comm…
The U-shape without controls: A response to Glenn
Underemployment in the United States and Europe
The authors produce estimates for a new and better rate of underemployment for 25 countries using the European Labor Force Survey that is based on workers’ reports of their preferred hours at the going wage. Both voluntary and involuntary part-time workers report they want more hours. Full-time workers who say they want to change their hours, mostly say they want to reduce them. When the Great Recession hit, the number of hours of those who said …
Is Psychological Well-Being Linked to the Consumption of Fruit and Vegetables
Humans run on a fuel called food. Yet economists and other social scientists rarely study what people eat. We provide simple evidence consistent with the existence of a link between the consumption of fruit and vegetables and high well-being. In cross-sectional data, happiness and mental health rise in an approximately dose-response way with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables. The pattern is remarkably robust to adjustment for a…
Unionism and Employment Behaviour
Journal Article Unionism and Employment Behaviour Get access David G. Blanchflower, David G. Blanchflower Dartmouth College, NBER and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Neil Millward, Neil Millward Policy Studies Institute, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andrew J. Oswald Andrew J. Oswald Dartmouth College, NBER and Centre fo…
Fear, Unemployment and Pay Flexibility
First paragraph: The labour market plays a central role in macroeconomic analysis, and the theory of wage determination plays a central role in models of the labour market. Despite this, the behaviour of pay is not something economists can claim to understand fully
Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993–2019
Objectives. To investigate changes from 1993 to 2019 in the percentage of US citizens suffering extreme distress. Methods. Using data on 8.1 million randomly sampled US citizens, we created a new proxy measure for exceptional distress (the percentage who reported major mental and emotional problems in all 30 of the last 30 days). We examined time trends for different groups and predictors of distress. Results. The proportion of the US population …
Insider Power in Wage Determination
The paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent-sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labour market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the employer's financial performance and oligopolistic position) and outsider pressure (including external wages and unemployment). Lester's feasible "range" of w…
Estimating a Wage Curve for Britain 1973-90
Following A. W. Phillips's (1958) original work on the United Kingdom, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different approach. It uses macroeconomic data on 175,000 British workers from 1973 to 1990 to provide evidence for the existence of a negativel…
Wellbeing Rankings
Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive wellbeing measures-life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested-and four negative wellbeing variables-pain, sadness, anger and worry. Pooling the data for 2008-2017 we find country and sta…
The Gender Well-Being Gap
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 SWB metrics-37 positive affect and 18 negative affect-contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect…
Children, unhappiness and family finances
The Scots May Be Brave but They Are Neither Healthy Nor Happy
On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self‐assessed well‐being of Scots is lower than that of the English or Welsh, even after taking into account any differences in characteristics. Scots also suffer from higher levels of self‐assessed depression …
Profit-Related Pay: Prose Discovered
Journal Article Profit-Related Pay: Prose Discovered? Get access David G. Blanchflower, David G. Blanchflower University of Surrey and London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andrew J. Oswald Andrew J. Oswald London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 720–730, http…
The Mid-Life Dip in Well-Being: A Critique
The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood
Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child's mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course. We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in …
Job Creation and Job Destruction in Great Britain in the 1980s
Using data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990, the authors investigate processes of job creation and job destruction in Britain. They find that rates of employment growth, job creation, and job destruction were higher at the end of the 1980s than at the beginning. Both job creation and job destruction were extremely concentrated: about 50% of each was accounted for by just 4% of continuing establishments. Empl…
The Wage Impact of Trade Unions in the UK Public and Private Sectors
There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private‐sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993–2006, the gap between the membership premium in the public and private sectors closes with the addition of three‐digit occupational controls, although significant wage premia remain in both sectors. However, using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004, the public‐sector uni…
The U‐shape of happiness in Scotland
We examine well‐being in Scotland using micro data from the Scottish Health Survey and the UK Annual Population Surveys. We find evidence of a midlife nadir or zenith in Scotland in well‐being at around age 50 using a variety of measures of both happiness and unhappiness. We confirm that higher consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with higher levels of happiness in Scotland. We compare this with evidence for England from the Health S…
Hard times are only going to get harder
The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment
Journal Article The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment Get access The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment. By ASSAR LINDBECK and J. SNOWER DENNIS (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 285. £24.75 hardback. ISBN 0 262 12139 5). David G. Blanchflower David G. Blanchflower Dartmouth College and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal,…
Profit-Related Pay: Prose Discovered
Journal Article Profit-Related Pay: Prose Discovered? Get access David G. Blanchflower, David G. Blanchflower University of Surrey and London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andrew J. Oswald Andrew J. Oswald London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 392, 1 September 1988, Pages 720–730, http…
Insider Power in Wage Determination
The paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent-sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labour market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the employer's financial performance and oligopolistic position) and outsider pressure (including external wages and unemployment). Lester's feasible "range" of w…
Fear, Unemployment and Pay Flexibility
First paragraph: The labour market plays a central role in macroeconomic analysis, and the theory of wage determination plays a central role in models of the labour market. Despite this, the behaviour of pay is not something economists can claim to understand fully
The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment
Journal Article The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment Get access The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment. By ASSAR LINDBECK and J. SNOWER DENNIS (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 285. £24.75 hardback. ISBN 0 262 12139 5). David G. Blanchflower David G. Blanchflower Dartmouth College and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal,…
Unionism and Employment Behaviour
Journal Article Unionism and Employment Behaviour Get access David G. Blanchflower, David G. Blanchflower Dartmouth College, NBER and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Neil Millward, Neil Millward Policy Studies Institute, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andrew J. Oswald Andrew J. Oswald Dartmouth College, NBER and Centre fo…
The Legacy of Communist Labor Relations
This paper contrasts Intcrnational Social Science Programme (ISSP) surveys for Hungary, supplemented with related survey data for East Germany, Poland, and Slovenia, with ISSp data for Western countries, to examine the extent to which workers in traditionally communist societies differ in their attitudes toward woik cooditioas, wage inequality, the role of unions and the role of the state in determining labor market outcomes. We find sufficiently…
A longitudinal analysis of the young self-employed in Australia and the United States
Estimating a Wage Curve for Britain 1973-90
Following A. W. Phillips's (1958) original work on the United Kingdom, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different approach. It uses macroeconomic data on 175,000 British workers from 1973 to 1990 to provide evidence for the existence of a negativel…
An Introduction to the Wage Curve
This paper documents a statistical regulatity or law. It shows that there exists a downward-sloping curve linking the level of a worker's pay to the unemployment rate in the worker's region. The same curve can be found in microeconomic data sets from sixteen countries. The existence of this curve raises doubts about conventional wisdom in labor economics, regional economics, and macroeconomics
Job Creation and Job Destruction in Great Britain in the 1980s
Using data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990, the authors investigate processes of job creation and job destruction in Britain. They find that rates of employment growth, job creation, and job destruction were higher at the end of the 1980s than at the beginning. Both job creation and job destruction were extremely concentrated: about 50% of each was accounted for by just 4% of continuing establishments. Empl…
The Wage Curve
The Attitudinal Legacy of Communist Labor Relations
This study of workers' attitudes compares data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) surveys for former communist countries in Europe with ISSP data for Western countries over the period 1987-93, which covers the beginning of the transition to a market economy for the former communist countries. Consistent with their hypothesis that communist-run economies left an attitudinal "legacy," the authors find that the citizens of former comm…
What Makes an Entrepreneur?
This article uses various micro data sets to study entrepreneurship. Consistent with the existence of capital constraints on potential entrepreneurs, the estimates imply that the probability of self‐employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift. When directly questioned in interview surveys, potential entrepreneurs say that raising capital is their principal problem. Consistent with our theoretical…
Self-employment in OECD countries
Latent entrepreneurship across nations
Discrimination in the Small-Business Credit Market
We use data from the 1993 and 1998 National Surveys of Small Business Finances to examine the existence of racial discrimination in the small-business credit market. We conduct an econometric analysis of loan outcomes by race and find that black-owned small businesses are about twice as likely to be denied credit even after controlling for differences in creditworthiness and other factors. A series of specification checks indicates that this gap …
Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study
The links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness are studied using recent data on a sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Higher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. The happiness‐maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calc…
Well-being over time in Britain and the USA
The Scots May Be Brave but They Are Neither Healthy Nor Happy
On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self‐assessed well‐being of Scots is lower than that of the English or Welsh, even after taking into account any differences in characteristics. Scots also suffer from higher levels of self‐assessed depression …
Hypertension and happiness across nations
Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle
The U-shape without controls: A response to Glenn
Where Next for the Uk Economy? 1
First paragraph: It is with great pleasure I come to the University of Kent - especially to Keynes College. I was actually invited by Professor Francis Green, who I replaced for a year at Kingston Poly while he was on sabbatical leave more than 20 years ago. I have also known Professor Alan Carruth for years. Alan has done a great deal of important work on internal and external influences on pay that has had a considerable influence on my work. I…
Fear, Unemployment and Migration
We examine the impact on the UK economy of the flow of workers from ten East European countries after their accession to the European Union. We find evidence that those most susceptible to competition from these workers have seen weaker wage inflation. We document that the presence of these foreign workers has increased the fear of unemployment and helped to contain wage pressure. We argue that this inflow of workers has increased supply by more …
The Wage Impact of Trade Unions in the UK Public and Private Sectors
There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private‐sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993–2006, the gap between the membership premium in the public and private sectors closes with the addition of three‐digit occupational controls, although significant wage premia remain in both sectors. However, using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004, the public‐sector uni…
Economics (41 works) · Demographic economics (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (22 works) · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction (22 works) · Demography (21 works) · Labour economics (17 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (15 works) · Social Psychology (15 works)